[ANNOUCNE] repo - The Multiple Git Repository Tool

My "bundle related secret project" was released yesterday by Google as part of the Android open source release event. (I've mentioned it before on-list in the context of a modified "git status" output.)

Google developed two tools, repo and Gerrit, and open sourced them under the Apache License:

  http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=tools/repo.git
  http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=tools/gerrit.git

  git://android.git.kernel.org/tools/repo.git
  git://android.git.kernel.org/tools/gerrit.git

repo is a Python application to bind together Git repositories, something like "git submodule", except it can track a project's branch rather than a specific Git commit. repo is also able to natively import a tarball or zip file and use it to initialize a repository from an upstream source, then apply git based changes on top of that tarball. In other words, repo is (more or less) built to manage an OS distribution, in Git.

Gerrit is a web based code review system, forked off the open sourced Rietveld code review system. Gerrit runs on the highly scaleable Google App Engine platform, but probably could be ported to an open-source MySQL or PostgreSQL backend if people really wanted to do that.

You can read some more of how Android has applied these tools to its development process here:

  http://source.android.com/download
  http://source.android.com/submit-patches/workflow
  http://source.android.com/download/using-repo

Although the current tool documentation is only on the Android site, both the repo and Gerrit tools are not specific to Android and are designed to be applied to any project that wants to use a similar process.

repo and Gerrit are actually developed with themselves. You can use repo to fetch repo:

  curl http://android.git.kernel.org/repo >~/bin/repo
  chomd a+x ~/bin/repo

  mkdir myrepo
  cd myrepo

  repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/tools/manifest.git
  repo sync

The "git status" output I was talking about before is the "repo status" subcommand, e.g.:

  $ echo '# test' >>repo/repo   ; # modify a tracked file
  $ repo status
  project repo/                                   (*** NO BRANCH ***)
   -m     repo